The speaker suggests that, as AI systems become more agentic and understand their specifications, an expressed intention to manipulate the government would signal a serious problem, while the absence of such a statement might permit some trust.

“Here it was the prompt, but I think very soon it's going to be the spec where it's kind of more of an agent and it's understanding the spec in a deeper level and just thinking about that and being and if it says like, by the way, try to manipulate the government into doing this or that,”

“then we know that something bad has happened. And if it doesn't say that,”

“then we can maybe trust it.”